Back offices provide several critical business functions, among them: accounting, billing, claims management, IT, and order processing. Tasks whose delivery and quality of performance affect those of front offices, like contact centers when they engage with customers.
So, it stands to reason that how back offices schedule their staff and ensure their adherence will impact contact centers.
To learn more about back office workforce management (WFM), we had a virtual chat with Tiffany LaReau, Founder and Certified Workforce Manager at Human Numbers and a member of our Advisory Board.
Q. Tell us a little about yourself, including your strong interest in workforce management (WFM) and what drives it.
I started work as a temp in a call center in 1988, the week after I graduated high school. They made me permanent and I jumped around in various roles, including a front line phonebank agent and a back office business analyst.
In 1994, I was in the role of software engineer, writing automated scripts for repetitive tasks like issuing routine customer refunds (an example of “AI” in its earliest form) when my manager asked for a volunteer to learn a brand new software called workforce management.
I raised my hand, drove to Nashville, Tenn. and began learning TCS in a crowded room above a hibachi restaurant. I quickly found I was good at this work, especially forecasting. I love forecasting!
Q. Let’s set the stage. Do the functions of the back office, also operations matters like staff availability, affect the contact center and if so, how?
Schedule adherence might be completely out of the picture because it may not be necessary. But when the back office gets backed up that can trigger new phone calls from people checking in for status updates, and that is a circular relationship between both groups.
Q. Is staff forecasting and schedule generation for back office work i.e., WFM, different than that for the contact center? Does the back office use WFM systems and are there any special considerations?
Forecasting in back office is complicated by work that spans multiple days/hours. When there is down time because a request is in a pending status, that can be tricky for traditional WFM systems.
One solution is to decouple the forecast using a time-shift operator for lead times, then breaking down the work between its arrival date versus its completed date. To really get it right, the carry-over volume must be incorporated to make sure you’re covering any backlogs that are in play.
There are areas with back office WFM that are easier than with contact center WFM. For example, schedule bids are usually not on the table with back office groups because frequent rotations may not be easily tolerated by that group of workers.
Moreover, lunch and break optimizations are only necessary when there’s a full coverage model requirement, meaning the services require replies within seconds or minutes, not hours/days.
Another perk for back office scheduling is the paid time off (PTO) approval process might be way more lenient because of less restrictions on the number of people off at the same time.
“…schedule bids are usually not on the table with back office groups because frequent rotations may not be easily tolerated by that group of workers.” —Tiffany LaReau
This also makes it much easier to plan for events that include all employees, like team meetings or seasonal celebrations, because you don’t have to worry about keeping someone behind to cover the phones while everyone is away.
Q. Do you measure back office work? Is it different compared with contact center work?
In terms of how quickly things are getting handled, phone work and chat (front office) are usually measured by average speed of answer (ASA), service level (SL), and abandonment rate.
Back office work does not require the same level of urgency, and I measure it using a response time goal.
For example, calculating the required staff for off-phone activity that has a three-day time-to-process goal doesn’t fit in the ASA or SL metric calculation, so the solution to this is response time. The formula is easy enough: volume divided by (response time divided by AHT).
The trick is remembering to convert the response time to the same FTE hours in a day. So, if the goal is three days, and a full-time employee works eight hours a day, the response time is 24 (8 x 3 = 24). If the volume is 50, and the handle time is 1.5 hours, the entire formula is:
50 ÷ 24 ÷ 1.5 = 3 PEOPLE
All methods use handle times and volume, but front office work also uses an Erlang calculator that includes extra time for people that will need to be in the idle state, waiting on the next customer, which is required to meet ASA and SL goals. This becomes the inverse of the utilization/occupancy factor.
Microshifting and the Back Office/Contact Center
There are now discussions taking place about microshifting. This scheduling method breaks up workplace shifts into short segments when the work is being performed.
Microshifting accounts for personal tasks like picking up a child at school, a medical appointment, or a five to 10-minute fitness break in a workday, while ensuring adherence to the total number of hours the employee is committed to working.
So, we asked Tiffany about microshifting, and whether it applies to the back office and/or the contact center? If so, what are its benefits and the challenges, and what are her recommendations for using it?
“Microshifting in the workplace is very similar to microshifting in personal development: tiny, flexible, incremental changes that make positive, gradual adjustments,” says Tiffany.
“But sometimes the front office employees, like contact center agents, are hourly, which means they are eligible for overtime, and the back office employees are salaried (no overtime). The motivation for flexible shift coverage can be different between those groups.
“Salaried workers can compensate for time taken for non-work activities by working longer to make up for it. But rigidly scheduled hourly workers do not have that freedom; if they go off-line, like for errands outside of scheduled breaks and previously agreed-to PTO, they could lose their hours and wages.
“My recommendation is, if you are considering microshifting (or any other change), be prepared to protect employee satisfaction (pay, hours, benefits, tools). Also protect employee engagement (purpose, belonging, impact) when touching anyone’s schedule.
“There’s a great leadership book about this and more by Justin Robbins titled More Than a Motto.
“Regardless of your back office or front office (contact center) scheduling approach, it’s always a good idea to include the staff in the scheduling process itself; forming a schedule task force and including them from start to finish will create allies along the way.”
Q. What do you see as the potential pitfalls and red flags in WFM for the back office?
A lack of available reports is common; time trial studies can help with that, especially if you’re starting from ground zero.
Many back office work groups do not have long term staffing models (capacity plans). One reason for this is because they attribute that kind of thing to “call centers” and don’t feel they are a call center.
But back offices can still benefit from a weekly long term plan because they still have seasonal volume, attrition, and they experience irregular planned time off.
Forecast accuracy for the back office also needs to be measured with a little more finesse than in a contact center. I recommend extending it to four components:
- Noise (unrepeated things).
- Short-lived events that were purposely ignored.
- Differences due to external business decisions other people made.
- Incorrect trend/growth rate assumptions which will naturally be absorbed into the forecasting methodology going forward.
It’s a little more complicated, but unless your forecast is incredibly unstable, I find that it’s not necessary for all four criteria to exist with every single weekly forecast; it only needs to happen when one of those criteria actually exists during the forecasting range.
“Forecast accuracy for the back office also needs to be measured with a little more finesse than in a contact center.”
Q. As a workforce manager yourself, which do you like doing most? Back office or contact center?
Since we have other WFMers here at Human Numbers that are better skilled at scheduling and training than I am, I choose to only work on forecasts and long-term staffing models.
From that perspective, a back office forecast is equally as fun as a front line forecast, and I am happiest when it’s just me and my Excel file, pounding away.
